When David Harrower's
play, Blackbird, first appeared at the Edinburgh International
Festival in 2005 in a production by German maestro, Peter Stein, it
provoked shock-waves among audiences who witnessed it. Given that
Harrower's play was a blistering study of a reunion between a
fifty-five year old man and a twenty-seven year old woman who had a
sexual relationship fifteen years before when the woman was twelve,
such a reaction was understandable.
However serious a
dissection of an ambiguous liaison the play undoubtedly was, it was
the production's closing scene that proved the most jaw-dropping. In
contrast to the play's over-riding intimacy, Stein grafted on an
unscripted five-minute finale in which the office block store-room
where the action took place was transformed into an underground car
park. Here, an actual car was driven onstage as the play's two
protagonists wrestled to a power ballad soundtrack, so the whole
thing resembled a 1980s MTV video epic.
Given the venues for
the Borders-based Firebrand Theatre's new production of Blackbird,
this experience is unlikely to be repeated. Rather, by having his
actors perform the play in actual office space and a small studio
theatre as well as the former veterinary demonstration room in
Edinburgh's Summerhall venue, director Richard Baron is getting back
to the claustrophobic emotional heart of the play as Harrower wrote
it.
“Blackbird works for
Firebrand,” Baron says. “Yes, it's a two-hander, and yes, it only
has one setting, but more importantly, it seems to fit in with the
other work we've done. It's intimate, it's brilliantly written, and I
think as a play it's probably even more contemporary now than it was
when it was first done. There's stuff coming out in the press every
day about various court cases, and there are people coming out of the
woodwork, some honourably, others not, who are talking about issues
which aren't that removed from some of the issues raised in the play.
“With all that in
mind, Blackbird struck me as a strong contemporary play that could
take an audience on a journey. So it's a bit of a risk in some ways,
but when we did another David Harrower play, 54% Acrylic, we did it
as a Play, Pie and A Pint, with the audience sat at tables in a
function room, and we realised how well that worked. I think
Blackbird works in the same way, so when the violence and sex scenes
happen, the audience are only five feet away, and the play really is
in their face. By taking it to these private spaces as well, it
feels like you're in a prison cell or a dungeon, so it becomes very
much a symbolic backdrop to the play.”
Blackbird perhaps isn't
the obvious choice for a small, rural-based company like Firebrand,
which was founded by co-artistic directors Janet Coulson and Ellie
Zeegan in 2011. With Baron as director of productions and designer
Edward Lipscomb an associate artist, Firebrand set out to produce
contemporary theatre of a kind not often seen in areas more used to
seeing more obviously commercial fare onstage.
With this in mind,
Firebrand launched with a production of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads,
which was followed by a revisitation of David Greig's short play,
Being Norwegian. This was followed by a look sat David Mamet's
controversial two-hander, Oleanna and revivals of Rona Munro's
prison-set Iron, Peter Arnott's neglected White Rose and 54% Acrylic.
“There is an audience
in Hawick for contemporary theatre like this,” Baron observes.
“We're still building that, but there are some people who've come
to our shows who've never been to the theatre in their lives, and in
post-show discussions, what comes across is the intelligence of the
audience and a real desire for the sort of work we're putting on.”
Next on the agenda for
Baron and Firebrand is a new production of David Greig's play,
Outlying Islands, which Baron describes as “another intimate play
that throws up all sorts of different themes that still matter. In
contemporary Scottish theatre there seem to be lots of those.”
None perhaps more so
than Blackbird.
“Blackbird has an
emotional heart in the way a lot of American plays do,” says Baron.
“There's a beating heart to it, and there's blood on the carpet.
These are ordinary people, who've been through these things that
we've all been through, like falling in love, but this leaps a
barrier. “
Blackbird, Heart of
Hawick, Hawick, February 20-22; The Space, Heriot Watt/Borders
College, February 24; Summerhall, Edinburgh, February 26-March 1.
The Herald, February 18th 2014
ends
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